Zero-Shot Prompting

Zero-shot prompting is asking an AI model to perform a task without providing any examples of how to do it — just a description of what you want. Most everyday AI use is zero-shot: "Summarize this document" or "Write a proposal for this client." Zero-shot works well for tasks the model has encountered frequently in training. It works less well for novel tasks, specialized formats, or outputs that require a specific structure the model hasn't been explicitly shown.